A note on post-factual politics

From “Me You Us: Britishness in a Connected Age” in Being British, Ed. Matthew D’Ancona, Mainstream Publishing 2009

One of the weirder phenomena in US and UK politics right now is the lack of traction or interest in “facts” or “experts”.

I’ve posted about this before, but am reminded that I did write about this in a great collection of essays that Matthew D’Ancona edited (on behalf of PM Gordon Brown in the latter days of the last Labour Government). Brown spent a lot of time trying to grasp with the notion of Britishness in the modern era, in the era of devolved government and globalisation: what, he seemed to ask, could we use as the foundations of a shared national politics?

“With a clearer sense of who we are and of the values we share, we are far better equipped as a country to manage constitutional change, citizenship and security, and – with a  clearer sense of our common national purpose –  to address the challenges that Britain faces in a rapidly changing world” 

A lot of the essays focus on the specifics of our ideas about Britain or attempt to trace historical continuities in supposedly shared values – mine seeks to explain the development of this new political landscape in which the ideas and recommendations of the Big Men (experts and authorities) were being abandoned for that of our peers. The power shift from Big Men to the Bloke Down The Pub/Everyone I know…

I’ve been thinking a lot about this again in recent weeks – the willingness of many voters in the US and the UK to loudly ignore reputable sources of “facts” and to prefer feelings, hunches and suspicions. Arguably, almost everything that the UK government’s Remain campaign predicted – cast by its opponents as Project Fear, incidentally – has turned out to be correct. My savings and my clients’ willingness to spend have both been knocked.

Conversely, many of the “facts” on which the Leave campaign based its case to voters are now being quietly and sheepishly dropped by its leaders (the famous bus-side £350m number to be spent on the NHS being one, the inflated perceptions of immigrant numbers and their contribution or otherwise to the country, the ability of any country wanting to access the Single Market to control EU migrants, the deliberate myth-making about the EU and its regulations etc). There has been a sense from Leavers that – as one of its now dethroned leaders put it – we’re fed up with experts and their annoying facts. 

In the US, the Trump campaign seems to have been built on a similar impressionistic approach to campaigning. To those fearing for their own culture, summoning up the threat of waves of outsiders like Mexican immigrants is palpable (no matter about the numbers); to those fearing for their own economic well-being in a complex changing world, the simple answers that come from those who claim – just like them – to be outsiders are sweet and alluring; rather than challenge competitors’ policies directly, it’s easier to try to suggest – again and again – impropriety of some sort in the opposition’s candidate to keep people on your side.

Of course, you can explain some of this in terms of individual psychology – emotional vs rational decision-making, availability bias and selective perception, lazy minds and System 1 etc etc.

But the really big insight for me – the one that lies at the heart of that essay I wrote back in 2009 – is rather different: it’s the way that we are now connected to each other that has changed the way our politics and so much in our culture works. Not, as some claim, so that the mainstream media become redundant , but we have rewired our interaction to each other and with each other around what we think and feel. Who we think we are and who we pay attention to. Who’s on the inside and who’s not.

It’s the space between: Me, You & Us. Again.

Being British is still in print, here